Process, Content,
and Dissemination: Photography and Music
CHARLOTTE COTTON
Every generation thinks of itself as living through a pivotal moment in history. But when it comes to the effect of digital technologies on how both music and commercial images are created, funded, and disseminated, this is truly one such time. Though I suspect that my reasons for wanting to find paradigms from these two creative arenas are personal and generational, they are also motivated by a sense that I must establish a position on these territories, both in order to fulfill myself intellectually and to contribute to my profession in meaningful ways. I’m basically middle-aged. My sense of self emerged from the passions for music, fashion, and photography I developed when I hit puberty. I’m part of that “platform-sensitive” generation that still wants to be part of the action (making and consuming) without ever saying, “Well, in my day…”. On a professional front, I’m a curator who works mainly with photography—one who isn’t sold on the idea that my twenty-first-century role is to play the violin while the Titanic of analog photography sinks. This moment requires that I be very thoughtful about how we look at and experience our day-to-day and leisure time; how ideas are visually communicated (in essence, our visual literacy and preferences); and how these factors shape the future of museums.
I’m not setting out to prove that the creation, production, and dissemination of pop music is the perfect paradigm of what has happened or is about to happen to commercial image-making. Nor will I try to predict what route advertising by luxury brands should take. There are blatant differences between these industries: when all is said and done, popular songs are more culturally important, in my view, than any line of handbags, sunglasses, or shoes, no matter how innovative the ad campaign might be. Music clearly lends itself to, and is realized directly via, digital platforms, with images functioning as the supporting visuals for the message. Advertising imagery simulates, alludes to, and narrates its products, and thus must work harder than do music visuals to evoke the sensation of what we might eventually buy. This explains why the production and dissemination budgets for luxury-brand campaigns traditionally outweigh those for marketing recording artists.
However, both the music and luxury-brand industries have experienced massive and parallel changes in the 2000s. Both are grappling with the impact of a reconfigured corporate culture on who and what gets backing, who their products reach, who pays, who gets fees, and who gets percentages. There are new tools for making, new makers, new middlemen, new platforms, and new market theories. Given the seemingly limitless opportunities that the digital world offers for exploiting existing markets and discovering new ones, both industries are now like the Wild West. Both face the challenge of creating meaningful, “authentic” experiences within a landscape of shifting priorities, technologies, and value systems.
In my previous lives in the 2000s, I held two very different vantage points from which to view the shifting kaleidoscope of commercial image-making. One was situated within an agency that created much of the luxury-brand advertising and high-production editorial work in the glossy magazines of the time. The other has been, as it is now, from the perspective of an encyclopedic museum that holds collections of design, costumes and textiles, and photography, and which I therefore felt should lend cultural credence to photography’s biggest industry, not just its rarefied strata of art production.
PAY AND DOWNLOAD
In the advertising agency world of the mid-2000s, one of the recurring questions that the music industry generated was whether the iTunes model of pay-and-download would impact commercial image-making. The question was whether consumers (vaguely defined, perhaps, as ”platform-agnostic,” logo-loving, credit card carrying, twelve-year-old girls) would pay ninety-nine cents to download an entire season’s Prada ads—or even some golden oldies from a famous fashion photographer’s back catalogue—or if they would pay a subscription for behind-the-scenes footage sent to their cell phones. The answer to this is partly yes and mainly no, but more on that later. Inherent within the rather simple question of whether a profitable distribution tool for music could apply to image-making was our inability to anticipate which platform was going to be most important to luxury brands, how new contexts would impact the literal shape of commercial image-making; whether this was the moment to switch from a (by then dwindling) ”day rate” fee structure for photographers to a percentage of future, uncalculated online sales from licensing; or whether the immediately quantifiable sales figures and effects of stellar web-based image-making on actual sales would drive day rates back up to their former glory.
In retrospect, I can see that those teams of image-makers were asking an age-old question: "How do we get the money we need to do what we visually want to do?" What image-makers and their production and agenting teams were realizing was that luxury brands were cautious—as it turned out quite rightly—about shifting marketing budgets from print to online, and they did not intend to subsidize image-makers’ explorative dabbling on the web. While there had always been a lot of parlance about great image-makers’ supremacy and centrifugal importance in the identity of a brand (especially when said image-makers were in the room), these brands were not the sugar daddies to the unbridled creative expression of “rock star” photographers. Nor, indeed, were photographers being invited to take on a well-paid and dominant role in new media on the strength of their abilities to create magical print advertising. The jury was still out on whether the web and the platforms from which we experienced it in our offices and at home allowed us to distinguish between low (amateur) production values and commercial image-making. There were also the realities that advertising (whether print or point-of-sale or online) is an imprecise science, and that compelling an online browser to drop two weeks’ salary on a pair of designer shoes based on a pop-up window of a static image—or even on a gorgeous three-minute advertisement—didn’t exactly have a precedent. On top of this, 9/11 happened. The effects of 9/11 on the scope of advertising, as all consumer-based businesses tried to ”normalize” taste and consumption as effectively as possible, is a subject in its own right. For this essay, it’s important to note that 9/11 was another force in the decline of belief in advertising luxury items, and a motivation for everyone in the business to make cuts and be grateful to be employed at all. Probably the biggest effects that I noticed was that the major image-makers who created the visuals for the very top brands not only cut their day rates, but took on middling ad jobs at which they would have snorted with derision only a year before. For the rest of the commercial photography pool, this brought to an end the fantasy that if they worked for nothing to create editorial for both glossy and edgy magazines in order to build up a portfolio of brilliant ideas, they would secure one or two mediocre ad jobs that would keep them afloat and afford them to go out and make big pictures of landscapes with no art director breathing down their necks.
KEEPING IT REAL
How music and its image functioned on the web had a precedent in the early days of MTV, when a lot of rubbish was made—some so random it was brilliant—as well as occasional moments of perfection in which the intelligence, originality, and timeliness of the performers, their music, and the video visuals came together to define a cultural moment. Low-budget music and video could result in a hit and, with the right creative team, create a true star. Lil Wayne has sent much of his work out into the world via YouTube, and his authenticity blazes through in every deeply unadventurous and low-fi video. He released his first album at seventeen (in 1999) mentored by Bryan “Baby“ Williams, rapper and co-owner of the Cash Money label. Universal distributes the CDs and vinyl, and listeners download songs from the internet for free. Who knows how long it will be before a management team sets Lil Wayne up with a lucrative clothing line and a flashy video for every single, setting the wheels of brand exclusivity into motion. But, for now, he keeps it real for hip-hop. And Lil Wayne has good reason to keep hold of his strong and direct relationship with his fans. This past month, Lil Wayne’s album was released in stores and over 2 million albums (sales to consumers who could have and had downloaded MP3 tracks) were sold. These were predicated on the choices of consumers and not the strength of a marketing campaign, starkly contrasting to the significantly lower pay and downloads of Coldplay’s first new album tracks at exactly the same time.
Advertising agencies with car manufacturer clients and CGI technologies at their fingertips were quick to grasp the importance of YouTube, and—since we don’t often get a warm welcome at car showrooms to simply play with fast cars—digital interactives and YouTube car chases actually filled a gap in our desires. Volkswagen’s 2002 Cabrio spot by Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris accounted for the second-time-around hit from pretty-much niche (and by then deceased) artist Nick Drake. Pink Moon was the (presumably inexpensively) licensed soundtrack to this lyrical, popular-imagination-capturing sequence in which four teenagers drive to a party and then decide that the drive is a better experience than the cheap beer and awkward fumblings that await them. Thanks to the ad, Drake’s album sales went from 6,000 in the previous year to 74,000.
In 2002, OK Go was one of the new bands signed to Capitol during the vogue for the Fab Four model of pop acts. In the big league, they were “unknown,” and Capitol, with its marketing department and creative director, were getting ready to launch the band in the typical way: images of four guys shot from above, looking up at the camera à la The Who in the early 1960s, and probably a music video shoot booked with Olivier or Michel Gondry. But OK Go wasn’t one of those industry-generated bands; they are a brilliant live act with a stunning lead singer, and they like to dance. On an amateur video kit in an unspectacular back garden, they recorded a dance that they’d been using in live acts, as a reference for the future high-production video shoot. The creative director saw it and had no initial luck in convincing Capitol’s marketing team, including its web team, that this seemingly raw footage perfectly communicated what made the band unique. The turning point occurred backstage after an OK Go concert, near Capitol’s then-headquarters, after the audience went wild when the band did their dance. Capitol executives could then see how YouTube would reach a niche audience who could be counted on to virally spread the word, and they agreed that night that the rehearsal video should go online. The band’s follow-up video for "A Million Ways," which gave new meaning to a treadmill session at the gym, was specifically created for the viral landscape. The band rehearsed the performance over the course of one week with the lead singer’s choreographer sister, and the footage was shot on amateur video, the same locked-off shot as the previous blip and with no editing, all consciously deployed to relate to the kind of visual skits that anyone can create for YouTube, rather than some marketing manager’s high-production attempt to reach the kids. The "image-maker" was thus not an obvious part of the narrative, and that lack of blatantly slick promotion is integral to the video’s viral success. With viewing figures for the second blip at around 20 million, OK Go’s videos still did not generate record-breaking sales. They were, off the back of their viral popularity, invited to by MTV to perform their treadmill dance sequence live, at the MTV Video and Music Awards. Perhaps 300,000 copies of OK Go’s album were sold, which represents a thorough culling of a niche market in today’s climate. But there was no hit song, just a fantastic response to OK Go—hence the lack of translation into a top spot on radio playlists or a huge number of pay-and-download “hit” consumers. Instead, the success of OK Go translated into live gigs and merchandising sales, and the pay-off for Capitol was mainly in kudos for instigating some smart, forward-thinking marketing.
When image-making for pop stars works, it not only creates the initial online viral buzz, but it is sustained throughout every visual experience of the star or band. Robyn has been a popular performer and recording artist in Europe in recent years, producing her albums and singles (which have been very successful in the more dance-oriented youth culture that buys singles and their remixes) on her own record label. Our current love of all things Swedish is not enough to ensure that Robyn will become a successful pop star in the U.S., and the web has been an important element in projecting a clear identity for this singer/songwriter. Blipboutique’s Mary Fagot and James Frost created beautiful and witty video vignettes: some show the blonde, short-haired performer; others act as more oblique but equally tantalizing visualizations of her album tracks. Each one of these “blips” was sent as “exclusive” content to well-known music, lifestyle, and celebrity web sites such as that of Perez Hilton. They become the cues for the online conversations and market-testing facilities (YouTube can determine state-by-state, hour-by-hour viewing statistics) that determine whether your visual branding is causing a buzz and which cities to tour. The aesthetics and look established in the blips are reconfigured for Robyn’s live shows, public appearances, and the design of her CD and vinyl artwork.
WIN, WIN, WIN
Perhaps no pop star is more aware of the power of consistent image identity over the course of an album release and world tour than Madonna. In 2006, in the buildup to the release of Confessions on a Dance Floor, Madonna and her then record label, Warner, worked with one of her trusted image-makers, Steven Klein, and his then agency to create a dramatic and consistent image for this constantly self-reinventing diva.
Klein is perhaps the leading image-maker for the seductive and effective linking of designer fashion and celebrity. In July 2005, under the auspices of promoting the film Mr and Mrs Smith right as Brangelinagate developed, Klein was behind a special issue of W magazine that featured an edgy, sexy, fashion-rich fantasy of Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt as a 1960s husband and wife with dark secrets, guns and sex, and a gaggle of young children set in American suburbia.
Klein was then due to shoot Madonna for W. As editorial goes, the shoot had a pretty decent production budget, but instead of fighting for an editorial “day rate,” Klein and his management took a much more astute approach, pioneering a business model that would make the heady mix of celebrity, fashion, and image continue to work for all involved (think of all the advertising campaigns that include celebrities nowadays). With the lion’s share of the licensing revenue going to Klein and his agent, the shoot for W became a multipurpose event that produced coherent imagery for the album and worldwide tour (and precision-timed Madonna/Klein video installations in hireable art galleries); the visuals in the opening sequence of each performance; and alternate images distributed as editioned prints that were sold (out), mainly via Klein’s web site. While W held the first and exclusive rights to the editorial they had commissioned, thirty-two glossy fashion and lifestyle magazines worldwide licensed Madonna’s new image (Klein’s alternate images from the W shoot) for their front covers, timed with her live performances in each region of the world, and they paid hundreds of thousands in licensing fees. W got an in-budget, kudos-generating editorial and front cover, and Madonna and Warner effectively secured a coherent image campaign (free of charge); curtailed publications’ incentive to try to run out-of-date versions of the star on their front covers; and ensured respectable album sales and sell-out shows. International magazines got the latest version of Madonna on their covers, which would never have been possible (for practical and political reasons) if they had individually attempted to commission new photography. Klein and his agents’ income was certainly higher than any day rate, and the deal established his clear ownership of his images. It was win, win, win. As the difference between print advertising (marketing) and editorial (a point of view) becomes ever hazier and budgets are trimmed, the incorporation of other revenue streams into the production of shoots—especially those involving celebrities—will become more evident.
Last year, after Madonna completed her contract with Warner (who will presumably be making its money from greatest hits and single licensing of Madonna’s back catalogue, as EMI will soon do with Radiohead’s previous albums) she joined the Live Nation management company, which manages the “portfolio” revenue streams of music giants U2 and Jay-Z. I read somewhere that her four-year deal was for $170 million, with all revenue from her shows going to Live Nation. For a star such as Madonna—a disciplined and seamlessly brilliant performer—the cash cow is not the album sales but the live shows, with a reported $300 starter price for tickets to her forthcoming tour. What is generally happening in both music and commercial image-making are micro- and macro-structural changes: attempts by powerful brands and stars, management companies, and media stream and content providers to merge and consolidate their interests in light of digitization.
CASA THIS, CASA THAT
Tom Ford is probably the fashion world’s nearest equivalent to Madonna. For both, there’s a sense that, in pure business terms, they are who they are only in part because of their personal managerial teams and the big businesses to which they’ve been under contract or franchised. But just as we don’t call Madonna a “singer/songwriter,” Tom Ford is not simply a “fashion designer,” and that’s not merely a byproduct of the way both have been packaged by high finance. The success of Ford and Madonna is not purely about how their talents are molded (by others) into business models. Rather, both are deeply controlling, image-conscious, platform-greedy creatives. Not only do they oversee, in highly informed ways, how their message translates into merchandise and marketing, but their very creativity is fueled by this oversight. Ford went from his 1990 starter position as chief designer for women’s ready-to-wear in an almost-bankrupt Gucci, to being the creative director of all things Gucci and YSL (which the Gucci Group had bought in the early 2000s). Ford’s creativity wasn’t stifled but made by the market for luxury goods, and Gucci became an über-successful business because of his flare for seeing beyond the button holes. In an era in which top stylists were the creative consultants and occasionally the chief designers for fashion houses, and in which making the “image” of a fashion brand was embedded into their thought process rather than a later translation, Ford was the perfect designer. If you employed the rock stars of photography and design, made sure that the right celebrities got the gear for free, held talk-of-the-town parties in the right cities (Miami), and then made sure that your manufacturing methods could economically support queues around the block for mere mortals to get the goods come sales time, you might have a success on your hands. Madonna and Ford have worked with the fervour of Marines, have seemingly avoided the crises of celebrity confidence that overspill into drug habits and breakdowns, and have kept true to being the absolute best. They reach markets that understand and desire how that search for perfection, and the brand image, is embodied in every diffusion and diversification of their merchandise.
IT’S NOT ABOUT THE HOUSE IN THE HAMPTONS
We are just at the point where the next generation of musicians, designers, and image-makers have grown up creating with discs and software rather than with tape or film (and both industries are especially interested in youthful creation). But our current landscape is predominantly shaped by a generation that started making and experiencing culture in an analog world. Radiohead is an authentic band who have been creating and performing together for over twenty years. For them, digital means of composing, recording, and producing software wasn’t a foreign, Armageddon-laden new language, but a new tool to creatively explore. I think it’s fair to say that Radiohead, with their creative exploration of digital media, have developed an even more pure communication of who they are and have been from the outset. Their process is as riddled with anxieties and self-doubt as any previous acts of genuine creation have been; digital was not about making creativity easier. Radiohead also didn’t leave it to others to work out what digital offered in terms of distribution of their message (they have something to say rather than just servicing an industry model or getting famous). By the 2000s, even if you were one of the very few artists who had deployed new technologies in genuinely creative ways (rather than just as faster and cheaper mimicry of analog practice) but you had surrounded yourself with a lot of middlemen to funnel your creative vision, the impact of digital threatened your creative freedom. Record labels, luxury brands, and advertising agencies had all failed to grasp the potential meaning of digital dissemination and commerce, and we did not yet have more than tech guys to guide the transition. Browsing, experiencing, and shopping online are all profoundly user-driven, and suddenly potential customers were—en masse and in surveyable ways—a force companies had to seriously reckon with.
It doesn’t matter what profession or industry you come from: if you are past thirty-five years of age, you will at some point have been hit with the realization that, while you might have thought that you and your friends and peers were all aiming for the same thing, you actually weren’t. While for some creatives the acts of making and communicating are their reasons for getting out of bed in the morning, others have decided to aim for the house upstate, the luxury man-toys, and the right schools for the little ones. If you consider that this modus operandi-divide is even more heavily weighted toward the annual bonus in every management company, ad agency, publishing empire and board room, it’s not surprising that so few truly innovative and meaningful creative expressions using digital technologies have come about.
Radiohead’s social values and their reasons for creating always meant that they were resistant to the branding treatment that a music corporation would typically apply. From the moment it became creatively tenable and not a financial risk so big that it could actually stop their music reaching their fans, Radiohead have created, produced, and published their music in an unusually independent way. There were 100,000 downloads of In Rainbows in the first twenty-four hours after the band released the album (in both MP3 and vinyl formats) from their Inrainbows site and free download sites. On Radiohead’s site, listeners had the option to choose whether and how much to pay for the album. The band thus “stole market share” from pirate music sites, and they sent a clear message that the most important thing for them was to get the music out there, and to respect the role of downloaders and consumers who went online as a part of their self-informing process in shaping the culture of the internet (thus cleverly folding digitization into their process once again). It became clear that the consumers of their music still wanted a CD—not simply music buyers who found MP3 pay-and-download altogether too intangible, or had no desire to actively return to vinyl. but consumers who distinguished between a CD and the design of its packaging and went on to essentially buy into In Rainbows for a second or third time. Radiohead also called upon a small West coast record label (part of the larger independent label ATO) to distribute the CD. The vinyl version of In Rainbows has proved popular too, marking the revival in some music genres of what we had thought of as a defunct form. Of course, there is a heavy dollop of nostalgia in our re-appreciation of vinyl, letterpress, and gelatin-silver papers, but it means something different from the development of a new heritage industry: this is not the sepia-tone filter in Photoshop. It’s nostalgia in the sense of us returning home, in small, boutique numbers, to forms that have new currency in light of so much virtual experience and consumption, and thus defining where and when tangible objecthood has meaning in our consumer culture.
BLAST FROM THE PAST
One of the most important facets of the digital era is that it created both markets and desires to revisit the past, and provided enough of a conflation between publishing archives and back catalogues, new distribution networks, and surfing and browsing behavior, to satisfy these desires. I’m sure the term “heritage artist” existed prior to the recent discoveries in the archives of major record labels and the digital re-mastering of classics. But what is transformative and particular to the digital era is how it brings popular music’s analog past back to life, allowing us to have a potentially deeper relationship with, and even to rethink, a culture beyond the distortions and hoopla of its moment. Web culture is truly a second life for our musical heritage. It allows us to find our fellow enthusiasts and to edit, tag, compile, comment on, and critique what we find, all within the lucrative-enough environment that iTunes and Netflix, for example, identified in making back catalogues of music and film that would command little or no space in stores. While acknowledging the Big Brotherliness of having any online purchase followed up with a whole list of recommendations, I like to think of it as being shown the whole shelf in a library (the ordering logic of which I also don’t have control of), and there’s a chance that the same serendipitous experience will lead and inform my interests in wonderfully unexpected ways. Just as I expect most substantial nuggets of culture that I can access for free—whether it be an exhibition, independent and undistributed film and video, a documentary, or podcasted lectures and concerts—to include corporate sponsors’ or grant-giving foundations’ credits, I’m willing to pay and download or join with a modest monthly subscription for the pleasure of access to more than the most heavily marketed billboard track or opening weekend blockbuster.
One of the few plus sides of reality TV’s obsession for going “behind-the-scenes” in any situation, as well as of “the-making-of” bonus material that acts as an incentive to purchase a DVD, is that we are much more aware of the many roles and phases that come between an idea’s conception and its realization. We know about cinematographers, music producers, and art directors, and somewhere on the web someone has compiled their track records. While affordable and worthwhile software packages such as eMagic and Logic Pro make it possible for anyone to consider him- or herself a musician, and Photoshop and Hewlett Packard have serviced the needs and developed the desires of young and old photographers to express themselves in artful ways, perhaps the most ubiquitous, day-to-day skill base that the digital arena has created makes everyone an editor, a curator, and a stylist.
THE MUSEOFYING EFFECT
Just as vinyl and CD box sets of digitally re-mastered “heritage artists” were beautifully presented to new audiences and musicians to study and cherish, there was a timely re-contextualizing of absolutely pivotal image-makers in cultural spaces—a new locus for the appreciation and understanding of popular mass-consumed photography. At the most tangible, physical, object-led end of the digital, we have been offered essentially connoisseurial experiences, from “Heritage artist” and genre box-sets with beautiful production values; to re-mastered, “Director’s cut,” and recolored analog film classics in DVD box sets; to high-production, exquisitely designed limited-edition coffee table books and big photographic prints by commercial photography’s “heritage artists.” Helmut Newton, with his libidinous drive to repeatedly visualize his Germanic, Amazonian dominatrix, was one of the first fashion photographers to comprehend how the coffee table book and then the gallery could be contexts in which to command and shore up his indelible stamp on visual culture. His great competitor on the pages of French Vogue in the late 1960s and 1970s, Guy Bourdin, never got the right book or exhibition offer in his lifetime, and he had too much respect for true artists to just print up his incendiary (in the context of a double-page spread) imagery for a temporary space on museum walls. Instead, more than ten years after his death, Bourdin was re-mastered to give the equivalent increased heart rate and saliva buildup that a 1972 French Vogue reader felt turning the page to one of his Charles Jourdan shoe advertisements. In a heavily designed exhibition, viewers experienced the guilty pleasure of being thoroughly aware of their voyeurism and politically incorrect fantasies in ways (digitized film and gorgeous Lightjet prints) that had not been open to Bourdin in his lifetime. Because the relationship between selling and available product was well and truly lost in the mists of time, such commercial image-making was safe territory for cultural institutions to explore. The fact that there was an “available product”—limited-edition photographic prints—wasn’t especially interesting or threatening for museums and their according of “cultural value” to commercial image-makers. The museum’s visitors weren’t going to feel pressured into buying prints, and its collector benefactors quite rightly saw these editions as no more than objects of consumption for fashion editors and art directors, equivalent to this season’s most-wanted handbag or a Charles Eames chair from a “design art” auction sale.
Museums tend to define “contemporary” as a period of artistic production beginning in about 1965, forming Contemporary Departments in about 1970 to deal with the burst of new ideas, forms, and practices. Essentially old fashion photography not only fitted right into institutional politics, but it offered a cultural commodity that museums perceived as contemporary and attractive to younger and more visitors. What received little notice was the fact that the increasingly powerful marketing departments of museums seemed to privilege exhibitions that promised good opening night parties. Further, few people seemed to care about the actual meaning of putting commercial imagery, translated into photographic print form, into repainted (from black to white) frame stock that had previously been used for Edward Weston or Julia Margaret Cameron masterworks.
THE ART AND FASHION THING
While old-fashioned photography held curators to no greater responsibility than to mystify and window-dress the profound differences between art and fashion image-making, the relationship between art and fashion created in the past ten years is much murkier. “Artist” was a term to be used judiciously in the field of contemporary art photography in the mid-1990s, when anything measuring 30”x40” and backed with aluminium stood a chance of being collected—and was sometimes indistinguishable from a commissioned image when reproduced on a magazine page. “Artist” is not a term to apply to commercial image-makers on the grounds that they underwrote the high production costs of spectacular (by gallery standards), well-attended museum exhibitions that gave institutions exposure in the style pages of newspapers and magazines during the era of institutional “re-branding.”
In retrospect, I think the biggest misunderstanding about the relationship between art and fashion occurred around 1996; that it cross-fertilized. While heavily preconceived, “directorial mode” art photography—which could require as much pre- and post-production as an advertising shoot (and as many assistants, lighting experts, prop designers and models as fashion)—bore a passing resemblance to commercial image-making, its intent and ultimate resolution were ostensibly very different. Contemporary art was more fashionable than fashion at that moment, and although there were many more shoots scheduled in new museum galleries with real art as the backdrop, and a few art photographers having fun on big-production fashion shoots, I wonder if we’d still consider this a genuine fusing of the two worlds. Circumstances were mitigated by what was happening to fashion magazine publishing at the time, and to the reasons why we bought magazines. The monthly glossy magazines that survived the post-9/11 crisis in confidence of publishing financiers were those that had a brand name with foundations solid enough to weather the storm. Publishing companies weighed the realities that their subscription numbers had leveled out for good and might even decrease, while luxury-brand advertisers who were powerfully co-opting editorial content with product placement still considered the “quality” readership to be their target audience. Longstanding titles began to diversify, finding revenue streams in licensing (greetings cards, calendars, knickknacks) and coffee table anthologies, as well as in the sale of vintage prints from their archives. The established but independent magazines either went under or survived because they had maintained such a consistent identity and strong editorial direction, and possibly brought in aggressive advertising account managers. Bimonthly or quarterly titles with editors of true vision and nerves of steel maintained the glossy, elitist, and desire-inducing high end of fashion image-making. But even though digitization had massively reduced the costs of printing, the great economic variable of paper stock prices (the oil of the media world) made monthly magazine publishing an increasingly risky business and a “loss leader” enterprise. Buying a magazine off the shelf (the type of shelf also diversified from being above the newspaper section to sitting alongside books and on the sales counters of fashion boutiques) became more expensive, deluxe, and ritualistic. The remnants of thinking that a magazine—even one that was published every month—was your first port of call for the latest style news was about to end in light of online search engines. We became more aware of just how fetishistic the experience of scanning and turning the pages of a glossy magazine had become (we’d stopped reading the editorial fluff quite some time ago); it was thus less and less of a contradiction to instead turn to a museum to survey image-making on the walls.
In the early 2000s, I still held on to my optimism that curating fashion photography for an institution did not have to mean just blowing up an image to “gallery size” and making it look like bad art, or creating a parallel between scanning a gallery wall with the now seemingly super-slow turning of glossy magazine pages. I still thought that there was a difference between the practice of a curator and those of a picture editor or art director. I did, and still do, think that commercial image-making is culturally important and deserves careful analysis and explanation from a cultural institution’s perspective. I was also excited about what contemporary image-makers would create for the screen—to see how masters of context would narrate and develop new forms in the digital era.
THE NEW EDITORIAL
At first, I couldn’t quite understand why glossy magazines didn’t jump all over the internet. While around forty people work at UK Vogue, it looks to me as if four people create Vogue.com and probably three very hardworking interns put Vogue.TV together. It became pretty obvious that print magazines were doing the absolute minimum on the web while the jury was still out on how to make a serious and creative investment in new media platforms. The first really interesting proposition for what the web and screen could mean for fashion image-making was Showstudio.com, conceived and started by Nick Knight in 2000 with the early input of designer Peter Saville and editorial shaping by Alice Rawsthorn. Nick Knight is one of the most technology-hungry and context-aware innovators of image-making, and Showstudio became a self-financed platform for his own investigations of new media. From the outset, Showstudio was also a draw to not only photographers but fashion and graphic designers, musicians, animators, illustrators, creative directors, hair and make-up artists, and models who were not yet being commissioned to create web-specific content. From the outset, Showstudio was about revealing the collaborations and processes of commercial image-making and not hiding what made this genre of photography unique under the mystifying gauze of auteur theory. If you trawl through the site’s extensive archive, you will of course find projects that were so specific to their moment that they’ve lost their original intent or meaning, as well as ideas that just didn’t work or were ill-conceived. But this is no different from any experimental editorial venture; only out of a willingness to take risks does the future reveal itself. The site’s production values are often low, but there’s a sense that the pixels bear an aesthetic vocabulary that might be fully realized in future platforms. The most important thing is that this arena was created, and that virtually every avenue for fashion editorial for the web has been mapped out on this incredible initiative. No one could have predicted back in 2000 just what proportion of web users would convert to Mac formats, or when streaming would become fast and easy, or whether starting an exclusively online and live-event magazine concept would garner advertisers or subscriptions. While some advertising now covers a modicum of costs for editorially driven online projects, viewers’ surveys about subscriptions confirmed that this would not be its funding structure. Ironically, grant and foundation funding in Europe does reach such forums, perhaps mimicking the support (modest but symbolic) for new media artists and the general eagerness of foundations and cultural institutions to attach their names and resources to those who might meaningfully develop new media, rather than make such investigations a core activity for their own organizations.
“SPECIAL” PROJECTS
I’m not entirely sure whether it was big modern art museums or big luxury brands that put the “special” in special projects. I sometimes think that media-savvy brands brought in artists and digital thinkers (new agencies specifically shaping ideas for the web, plus traditional ad and design agencies successfully getting their head around this new arena) in the spirit of traditional arts organizations’ devotion to new practices and ideas. The two seem to have parallel structures. Museums: earmark a tiny space or “‘young’” curators to collaborate with “‘young’” artists, and expend about 0.3 % of the annual exhibitions budget on possibly the most interesting idea your organization supports, thus showing your commitment to genuinely contemporary art. Luxury brands: Hold a competition (not organized by your core creative team, lest they waste their costly time) to get a young filmmaker (preferably someone from China, Korea, India, or another targeted market) to make a short art film about your latest fragrance. Make sure that the production budget is so small and the brief so vague that the filmmaker creates a stinker that neither narrates your brand nor furthers his or her artistic career in any way whatsoever.
Really smart use of the special-projects model for marketing a brand has tended to be the terrain of already media-astute, high-street brands working with new digital media consultancy firms such as GoDigital, and new media producers such as Rehab and Tangozebra (acquired by Doubleclick, which is owned by Apple). The Sound of Color was a campaign launched earlier this year by Gap, featuring music by The Raveonettes, Dntel, Swizz Beatz, The Blakes, and Marie Digby. Each of these new music artists wrote a song relating to a color, and was then paired with a top video concept and production team to create the online campaign.
A couple of years ago, Diesel set up a fashiony version of Big Brother, streaming a webcam from a bedroom set where two female models and a hunk wore Diesel underwear and acted out the (presumably edited) blogged instructions from online users. Armani Exchange and Dazed and Confused magazine created a five-minute, grainy black-and-white film directed by Matt Irwin that brilliantly shows how the aesthetics of anything from the film Georgie Girl, David Bailey’s fashion snaps of Jean Shrimpton, and punk band fanzines can roll 1950s-to-early-1980s styling and aesthetics into one, all under the nostalgic gloss of monochrome. Last year, Vuitton commissioned filmmaker Bruno Aveillan, better known for his TV fragrance spots, to create a short film. The beautifully shot film follows a woman’s encounters on the rain-drenched, dark streets of a Parisian-looking city, as she carries a rather prominent handbag. It’s the best example I’ve seen of how a fashion editorial story with a beginning, middle, and end and high production values might translate into screen language.
Danish designer Mads Norgaard put two of his Copenhagen Experience trilogy videos on his web site. They are rather Christiane F. -meets-Warhol Factory with behind-the-scenes footage, and the 1978 song “Copenhagen” as the soundtrack (linked to iTunes) for one of them. Although I’m not that keen on fashion looks that require the bodies of actual twelve-year-olds or serious drug abuse, Norgaard has created a strong narrative that effectively encapsulates his collections’ identities for the web.
My favorite online marketing projects shaped from the get-go for online culture include Quicksilver’s short video, seemingly recorded on a cell phone before dawn, in which a group of surfer dudes in Copenhagen (the new Stockholm) throw a stick of dynamite into a placid lake to create a wave for one of the group to surf. Dior Jouallerie (yes, a made-up fashion word, my all-time favorite being “massimagical”) created a second-life environment in which avatars walk through a magical landscape with sculpture-like animations of this season’s exquisite costume jewelry collection. Prada’s Ebay-style auction of one-of-a-kind clothes and accessories that never made it into final production was not only a financial success, but it also showed how the brand could respond cleverly to E-commerce culture.
Prada also commissioned the online luxury-brand experience that I think best shows what fashion can become online. “Tremble Blossom” is a short animation with a production lineup nearly as big as that of a major advertising photo shoot or a small independent film, with James Lima as concept artist and Melissa Davies and Alan Barnett as creative directors. An avatar walks through an exquisite garden of organic forms (which patterned the latest collection), climaxing with the “birth” of this season’s big hit handbag from a narcissus-ready pool. Now, I know this sounds awful, but it isn’t. Put aside the fact that this animation was made to explore the genesis of a fashion collection and not to promote world peace, and you can see that this is one of the most remarkable, paradigm-shifting transitions of fashion image-making to the screen.
WHY ARE E-COMMERCE SITES SO UGLY?
This is a question I have asked myself a lot. My consumption of luxury goods is rare and highly dependent on being seduced and convinced through all my senses and with a lot of ceremony. Having seen the latest collections via runway shots on Style.com or in one or two magazine editorials, I will put on my Sunday best and make the pilgrimage to some of the most innovative architectural sites, with their brilliantly curated displays of design ideas. There, I’m willingly convinced that I can both carry off and afford high fashion, and, since no one notices that I am an impostor in fashionland—and knowing that an item might be the very last in my size—I go to the point of sale.
The traditional sales strategy for an elite brand is what a friend called the “Hermes model”: As soon as your print advertising seems to have brought your loyal customers back into your stores at the beginning of the season, you stop advertising. You produce a fixed number of, say, handbags, and you don’t go back into production, even if there seems to be an exceptional level of demand. In the 1990s, Nike used this elitist model to sell you a lot more sneakers at higher prices than you’d been previously willing to consider. China’s luxury market seems to have adopted this model with its typical awe-inspiring gusto, limiting availability and setting incredible prices for high-street items to successfully test how conceptual the idea of luxury is. And in the 2000s, EVERYTHING can be limited edition, including candy bars with “while stocks last” labels instead of sell-by dates. We have all become VIPs somewhere.
E-commerce sites didn’t work despite their awful designs, but because of them. I’m guessing that this is the luxury-brand Long Tail effect, wherein companies reach existing markets more thoroughly—markets that don’t need the full-on gorgeousness of marketing (they were always there, but only now are they being reached). Net-a-porter.com (which became a wildly successful E-commerce site once it introduced a “no-questions asked” returns policy) probably sells more Balenciaga bags than most of the brand’s stores and concession stands across the globe. It is the must-have brand, and women are willing to spend major sums of money over the internet because they feel grateful, as the Hermes model dictates, to actually be in the running to own this statement bit of luxury. All you want from images on an E-commerce site is that they be bright and flat-footed documentation of the product from many angles.
Editors at weekly celebrity mags go through the week’s paparazzi pics of both happy and in-crisis young female celebrities and It Girls carrying their (minimally free) handbags. I sometimes wonder if our current appetite for huge and expensive designer bags is only partly about our timeless desire to carry everything we own with us, and equally as much about how big a bag needs to be to stand out in an action shot. People’s Stylewatch, for example, responding to popular demand, is now a monthly issue for the newsstands of nothing but pictures of celebs (minor celebrities) and Disney Channel stars with this season’s accessories. So, by the time a luxury-brand shopper goes online, she knows which bag/sunglasses/shoes/scarf to buy, and it’s more a question of whether she can get it. Luxury brands’ online stores tend to be their global number one or two top-selling stores. While that might be very financially significant if you have only eight stores worldwide, it’s less so if you have 120. Either way, as it stands at the moment, not only are the items for sale in limited runs, but consumers have already had enough encouragement from gorgeous print ads, editorial pages, and paparazzi pics to justify why they MUST have a brand’s products. No luxury brand is currently interested in underwriting an innovative image-making structure—parallel in cost and ambition to what has existed in print and stores—that takes advantage of new technologies specifically for the web. There is absolutely no proof that this is needed in order to tempt the online consumer constituent for luxury items, nor is there any proof that fashion advertising in the traditional sense convinced anyone who was pretty much disinterested in or disdainful of fashion to part with so much as ninety-nine cents.
One of the questions that I began with was whether consumers would pay for and download commissioned photography and short videos, and I was thinking about this from the position that photographers should hold the copyright to their images and the right to exploit their licensing possibilities. What I should have been asking myself is whether luxury brands could create a product that, like iTunes, has no warehousing costs, and whether this in turn would require image-makers to create online buzz. The real tipping point for how luxury brands can move beyond segregating E-commerce from editorial and advertising image-making requires an exclusively online magazine to become somewhat like iTunes, but almost exactly like Amazon.com. There are, of course, many elements that some luxury-brand and fashion E-commerce sites share with Amazon, such as search facilities, blogs and chatrooms, and recommendation lists. But what we don’t yet have is an online magazine that sells constantly discounted and used “stock” like Amazon (storage costs are the responsibility of the producer, not the vendor, in this model), enticing consumers to shop because they know that they are highly unlikely to find a product at lower cost anywhere else. If an online luxury-brand magazine could make its free-subscription members feel like they are literally the first—possibly the only—consumers to be offered a product, the online magazine might become a reality. If luxury brands see the financial merit in selling products exclusively through E-commerce, and they stop discounting lines of product that are selling perfectly well at full price in stores, things will change.
IT’S ALL ABOUT THE LOOK
One of the problems for commercial image-making is that it’s accustomed to being very context-specific and carrying the accordant production values and aesthetics that those platforms engender. Most of us have real technology fatigue. We got to the point that nothing in our range of recent outlays on screens, software, phones, and TVs seemed to be, for more than a millisecond, the latest and best technology. Image-makers and advertisers who’ve attempted to create for online are well aware that they are not making anything like a standardized experience or aesthetic, given the range of screen types and qualities. But there is no such thing as an image or video without aesthetics, and even though I may prefer to have authorship look like authorship, I’ve learned in researching this essay that all commercial imagery responds to what is needed—maybe at its lowest common denominator, but still in an accurate and responsive aesthetic vocabulary. What is most likely to happen in the near future, as we gird our loins to purchase yet more kit (but perhaps the last in a long while), is that, whether we consider our cell phones or our TV screens more important, we will be able to easily feed everything through both of those platforms. Apple has sold the rights to develop new software in the hopes that someone is going to make it so easy to pay and download from your cell phone, Blackberry, and iPhones that the pretty unimpressive numbers of consumers using hand-held devices to buy MP3 and videos will increase dramatically. The “blips” or online music videos are going to be more in-demand and tailored for the iPhone format (and for their image-conscious, in both senses of the word, owners), just as most of the early online advertising took the Mac rather than the PC as its industry standard.
HDTV on big, flat screens, with its promise that not only will you run your entire life from the comfort of the sofa and maybe drag your teenagers back from the isolation of their bedrooms, will begin to define the aesthetics of music and luxury brand images. Recently, I flicked through a big stash of 1980s glossy magazines and was ghoulishly fascinated by how big the models’ pores were; I played “spot the zit beneath the pancake makeup” for quite awhile. Now, I am one of the sisters: I deplored the way highly sophisticated Photoshop in the mid-2000s—especially when translated by the gloop of printing inks—made imagery of women not only unrealistic but akin to waxy, deathly avatars. HDTV is a blazing, literally high-definition platform, and there is not enough money in the world to retouch every frame upon every actor, performer, or model’s face. I’m not expecting HDTV to catalyze the next phase of emancipation, but what I think will happen to onscreen aesthetics is that we will see a lot more ultrabright imagery, as if the ring flash were constantly on. There will also be a simulated analog-look, sometimes in ever-so-arty black-and-white (dirt and cracks will be the screen’s version of the new materiality). Twilight and nighttime will become much more regular, because it will be the first time in home-based screenwatching that dark shooting conditions won’t translate into seeing your reflection at a deeply unflattering angle. If someone very smart finds a way to get a luxury-brand TV channel off the ground, and develops a manufacturing model that works for this format of E-commerce (one that has interesting enough content for viewer/consumers to Tivo), then I look forward to writing a sequel to this essay.
WE CAN REALLY ROCK
In 2006, an Alexander McQueen runway show opened with a virtual vision of Kate Moss, a diaphanous haute couture gown billowing around her, held within a multifaceted glass structure. If there was one fashion experience I wish I had known about in advance in order to call in all the favors owed me by fashion’s elite, this was it. I still want to have been there. The image (inaccurately called a hologram, because it appeared to be almost 3-dimensional) was created using 360-degree imaging, an LCD player, and the reflections off the glass structure. It was a smoke-and-mirrors spectacle that required new technology and showmanship as old as the hills.
The light artist Moritz Waldemeyer collaborated with designer Hussein Chalayan for the latter’s Spring/Summer 2008 catwalk show, in which models walked down the darkened runway with laser-generated balls of lights clustering and encircling them like a nighttime constellation of planets and stars. From time to time in the 2000s, museums have moved intelligently beyond fashion on static mannequins and in photographic prints in frames on walls to engage with the potentially very innovative fusion of haute couture, image-making, and new technologies and museum cultures. Radical Fashion, curated by Clare Wilcox for the Victoria and Albert Museum in 2002, raised the bar in terms of collaboration between a museum and fashion houses. It was, despite two very different understandings of schedules and conservation standards, a wonderful exhibition of fashion per se, image-making, and installations. The Met’s recent blog.mode: addressing fashion exhibition was both a gallery and an online experience, with visitors having access to both the exhibition of about sixty pieces from the museum’s outstanding costume collection, and to a blog where curators Andrew Bolton and Harold Koda began online discussions about each item.
Perhaps my favorite gallery-based fashion experience was at the Cartier Foundation in Paris in 2004, where Jean-Paul Gaultier created Pain Couture. The exhibition featured huge sculptures made out of bread, with Gaultier’s trademark pointy brassier; and croissants with blue stripes running through the dough, referencing both the French Revolution and Gaultier’s use of the French sailor t-shirt in his collections. It was soooooo French to mix haute couture with bread and a flashy contemporary art gallery that I played the Marseillaise in my head as I walked through the show. And, as Gaultier rightly said, “Fashion isn’t art and I’m not an artist. I’m an artisan, like a baker.”
Live music events seem to be of great cultural importance once again, and a (potentially) lucrative side of the music business. The live music event answers to our heightened desire to experience, in the real world and collectively, our culture of choice. I want fashion to do the same for the many and not just for the invited few of a runway extravaganza, and I think that cultural spaces provide a timely venue for this. If a comprehensive museum wants to couple the two sexiest forms in its lexicon (fashion and photography), I’m hoping that it does so in ways that are not pathetic shadows of the real things, or the crumbs from the table of fashion publishing or luxury brands. In my fantasy world, I’ll walk into a museum and hear the sounds of historic dress and the gaits of their invisible wearers. I might see through a reflection in a street-level gallery window to the moment when Poiret met Coco Chanel wearing a little black dress on a Paris boulevard: Poiret shouted “Who are you mourning, Madame Chanel?”, to which she replied, “You, Monsieur Poiret”—thus marking the passing of the baton from the very first Modernist designer to the most famous. I’d like a second-life environment that lets me enter a seventeenth-century parlor where avatars show me how furniture and dress created ergonomics and human gesture that contemporary eyes can only comprehend through new technologies. I’d love to see inside every hidden layer of a Dior New Look dress, and to understand the corsetry and the amount of fabric that this declaration of the end of wartime austerity embodies. We can use animation to do what we can’t physically do with costumes and textiles in museum collections, which is to go inside their construction, animate it, and see the long view all at once. There are image-makers out there who can realize a vision and anticipate an audience’s reactions and desires. They are not necessarily the high-profile cast of half-a-dozen big names that have monopolized print advertising and editorial, but small teams of video directors, software creators, web advertising agencies, production companies, set designers, illustrators, animators, and video and blip makers who are making the first innovations in music and fashion online and fresh visual standards in live events.
Museums are places to have meaningful experiences, where we make the past relevant to now or fail in our fundamental remit. The digital era reshapes how we look at and gather information, but it also reconfigures what types of experiences we desire. When these capabilities are harnessed to what we want to say to the world, then we really can rock.